PRESERVING ILOKANO AND OTHER LANGUAGES, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND CULTURAL DEMOCRACY

Fifth of a Series

The path we took at Nakem Conferences was never easy; it is not yet easy until today, this we now know full well.

When Ricky Nolasco was chair of the Commission on the Filipino Language, we made it sure that he knew what we were doing at Nakem Conferences.

For two consecutive years, in 2007 and 2008, we asked him to come to our conference and lend his name to the cause, which he did, and for which Nakem Conferences will always be grateful.

We sometimes feel that Nakem Conferences pushed him to side with our cause at the expense of his position as chair of the commission.

All told, what Nakem Conferences did and what Nakem Conferences continues to do in the interest of the goals of Education for All by 2015 is a commitment first to our peoples of the Amianan.

We are clear on this.

The six EFA Goals can never be vague to us as these are concerns that have not left us even when we were discriminated against, even when the tolerance for our languages and cultures was not the virtue that we saw, heard, and experienced during all these educational regimes that did not regard the difference and diversity that we offered as something of value to the development of our cultural and political citizenship.

Nakem Conferences could not be vague with what universal primary education was.

We went to school sharing seats with others, even walking barefoot for hours to experience the traces of words that were not ours, to go through the rite of getting into a world we do not understand because the words in that world were not ours.

Nakem Conferences could not be vague with increasing adult literacy: we owe it to our communities and our people that our adults will be able to read and write in the Ilokano language again.

With about eight Ilokanos in the country and millions more abroad, we have only a single monolingual magazine to speak of, with a weekly circulation of 50,000.

This means that a fraction of one percent (or .6%) only reads—or buys. Given that people share their reading materials with others, we can extrapolate and increase the number of readers to four per week.

We have these facts: the original number based on the weekly circulation reveals that: 6250 out of one million read.

With the multiplier, we have: 25,000 out of one million read, or a measly 200,000 out of some 8 million.

We cannot even compare the gravity of the situation when someone calmly said, “Houston, we have a problem!” in that calm NASA-speak.

We have an astronomical crisis pointing to the eventual disappearance of our language!

The tell-tale signs are there: you initiate a conversation in Ilokano with the young in Ilokandia and chances are you get a response in Tagalog or some foreign language.

This problem, of course, is compounded by the fact that many of our magazines and newspapers do not live long because: (a) the number of readership has always been a problem and (b) the overall environment for adult education does not support the learning process in the Ilokano language.

There are of course business issues related to the failure of these publications but this is not concern of this paper at this time.

Nakem Conferences could not be vague with the need for an education that is geared towards gender equality.

While the issue of gender equality takes as a subtext the issue of patriarchal privileges, our people are not blind to the immediacy of responding to inequalities resulting from these privileges.

We have not succeeded in all respects and that we need to educate ourselves further along these lines.

But given the right mix of motivations and incentives such as the learning environment, we will evolve a fairer and more just society for our people.

Our language, certainly, is not pure but polluted as every language is, but the fact that it accords respect for varieties of gender, for the equality of the sexes, and for the recognition of the virtue of acceptance and tolerance—this is enough data to make us proceed with our reading of this world of gender parity.

A Language of Critique, A Language of Possibility

Nakem Conferences and its work could be understood as our own language of critique. Our work in the Ilokano language and culture instruction at the University of Hawaii does the same thing.

The simple fact that Nakem Conferences came out of our desire to put in context the centennial celebration of the first 15 Ilokanos to work in the plantations of Hawaii already implicates the intrinsic connection between what we do at our university and at Nakem Conferences—and between what our Nakem Conference partners in the Philippines, through the consortium between Nakem Conferences Philippines and the Nakem Conferences International which is housed at our UH Ilokano Program.

This proves that there is this beautiful but delicate dance that we are doing in our respective organizations and academic institutions.

It is beautiful because we have come to a point where we can now speak who we are, not in the fullness of human speech yet because of constraints that are largely external and systematic but in the new courage we have found we do have.

These constraints are traceable to our educational bureaucracy such as the Department of Education, the Commission on Higher Education, and the TESDA.

This courage is an antidote to our having been rendered mute by the educational system, by the pressure of the school system to enjoy our acquiescence, silence, and acceptance of the status quo without question.

There is the delicate dance in our pursuit of the MLE goals, this we have to admit.

And the dance is delicate because we are walking on new ground even if we resist the old ground and insist on our freedom to walk on this new one.

Certainly, we are learning along the way, even as we try to respond to the challenges of the various MLE goals and its six areas of focused activity.

New Educational Practice of “Being More-So”

What we envision and what we want done at Nakem Conferences is the evolving of a new educational practice of “being more-so”, a practice that takes into fundamental account the language of the students and the language of teachers teaching these students.

We refuse here to look at language and its reality as something akin to a tool in learning, in education, and in understanding the world.

In our account of the new educational practice of being more-so, we look at language, like the hermeneutist Hans-George Gadamer, as that which mediates our understanding of the world, that which middles, that which is between us and the world.

Thus we can only come to an understanding of this world through language.

There is no other way.

That we have to perceive Ilokano to be always in the concrete, that it must be ours even if we accept that it is also beyond us, the fact that after taking a long hard look through numerous and diligent studies the United Nations has declared that it is the birthright of everyone to learn in his own mother tongue at least during the early stages of his education—all this makes it all the more relevant in understanding the place of MLE in our pursuit of education that emancipates, and that it emancipates because it grounds itself from the humanity of our students and our teachers, a humanity that is always life-long and thus demanding a life-long, continuing, ceaseless educational practice.

Now, we summon the poet Machado and we say: Indeed, there is no road. But we make the road while walking. We have begun to walk hoping that our efforts will shine on the road that materializes before us.

There are two things that have greeted us during the last few weeks—and these two things concern us all immigrants and migrants of this land.

We are not going to enter into debate on whether the more appropriate technical term that we use is that of being settlers—for we are, indeed, settlers as well, coming as we are from another land, our ways to coming to America and settling here varied and rough and unpaved at times.

The fact of the case is this: that we have been able to carve out a piece of our earth under the sun, and now trying to guard this piece of earth as fiercely as we can.

It is our prize for eking out a life here.

But the stories of our coming over—of our migrating to America, of our ‘coming to America—are not of the same beginning, not of the same middle, and certainly not of the same denouement.

Out there are the others—because Othered—migrants and immigrants, some of them branded, like herd, with that label that does not do justice to their sufferings and sacrifices: indocumentado, illegal, ‘tago-ng-tago’ (or someone who keeps on hiding, hiding away from the shadows of immigration officers who are out there to handcuff and deport them).

We have editorialized about the DREAM Act—Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors—and we have argued for the benefits it will give not only to the potential naturalized citizens who have come to this land, but to the larger American community.

We look at the same issue now, and we follow the same argument: that the Obama Administration initiative to give a chance to a number of those who can contribute to the fulfillment of that American Dream while at the same time pursuing it, is worth a try.

President Barack Obama, in his executive order, has said it right: that a path must be cleared to those people who have come here as a child, who have had no mind of their own but had been brought here involuntarily, have imbibed the ways of American life, have not known any other country but the United States, and have equipped themselves with citizenship skills by, among others, educating themselves to the ethos of America that they know as their own homeland.

The initiative is worth a try.

Cecilia Muñoz, White House director of intergovernmental affairs, has stated clearly what this initiative is all about, what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Memo of June 17, actually means: an initiative that gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice the task to review and ‘clear out low-priority cases on a case-to-case basic and make room to deport people who have been convicted of crimes or pose a security risk.’

Echoing the same argument for having the yet-to-be approved DREAM Act as a legislative initiative that has given some hopes to the deserving migrants, ICE Director John Norton says of the ‘prosecutorial discretion’ of his agency, that includes nineteen factors, including the coming of the potential beneficiary to the United States as a child of 15 or below, the pursuit of at least two years of college education, or service in the military.

There are criticisms to this initiative, of course, including the accusation that this is a dictatorial act on the part of the president, and that it is a categorical relief for any form of immigration violation.

Add this to the charge that this is unconstitutional.

We believe otherwise.

The initiative is at the heart of what the United States is all about.

We have much to gain when we recognize that this country of immigrants will be made greater by the influx of human resources that have much to offer—and our marginalized migrant deserve this recognition of what they can do, and the relief the magnanimous spirit of our laws can offer.

There are about more than 10 million estimated illegal immigrants in the country at the present.

Of this number, there are 300,000 cases for review in the immigration system, many of which do not fall under the category of ‘posing a serious threat’ but promising a contribution to the greatness of the United States.

Apart from the indigenous peoples and the native Hawaiians, we all have come to settle—to migrate—to this land at one point of our family narrative and history.

The United States that we know is built upon this vision of a great land and a great mix of peoples with their great mix of gifts and potentials.

We cannot now afford to watch from the sidelines and see the indocumentados, the ‘illegals,’ and the ‘tago-ng-tago’ children and young people to lose their chance at pursuing the American Dream for which they have come here through their elders, and for which dream they have been living for most of their young lives.

Our ethical duty is to stand with them—to stand with the marginalized migrants—and be counted.

The Pedro Bucaneg Award is the highest medal of honor in Iluko literature. But I returned it in support of a noble cause--the unnecessary "attack" in the Internet against Apo Ariel Agcaoili of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the unexplained expenses of funds of the major national association of Ilokano writers. The political act was made through a letter dated August 5, 2009 to the then president of Gumil Filipinas, giver of PBA, through Ariel Tabag, then secretary- general of the organization.

This is a theme that metamorphoses into the same over and over again in Ilokano literary history.

As an insider looking in, I can only grieve for the younger generation of writers who know only one way: the herd mentality of elders, not necessarily men alone, but women as well.

For here is what it is now, over here and yonder: there is but one and only one Word with respect to Ilokano literature, and it is the Word of the self-righteous who can afford to laugh in the face of injustices committed by a number of wannabe and inutile leaders.

Manong Amado Yoro, esteemed for his passion for what is right and intolerant of the excesses of others especially their endless need for power and their greed for recognition, wrote in one of the emails going around that one group kept on with the guffawing in light of the steps taken to right the wrongs done by someone who had wormed her way to power.

What a delight they could have had.

For indeed, these are writers who should know better, who should be sensitive to oppression and all those things that should be the focus of the pen to expose for the world to know.

What has happened to Ilokano writing is something the younger generation will have to work out, redeem, salvage, save.

Imagine a roundtrip ride to Baguio, minus two nights of sleeplessness, one for going, and the other for returning to your base somewhere in some other boondocks in the metro.

Imagine you are awake in all the hours that you get to the terminal and take that bus ride to the other cooler mountain up in the Amianan, and at five in the morning, you wake up the dawn as you get to alight from that bus and take your first cup of coffee under the pine trees, the mountain air crisp and smelling of the new earth spilling into the rain-soaked streets.

This is Baguio once more, a city you pine for, its secrets yours to keep forever, remaining unrevealed.

It is a talk that brought you there--and the autograph signing of the dictionary you have been able to put together after years of struggle with the Ilokano word.

Let us do the memory-making here: August 5, 2011, 1-3 PM, at the Social Science AVR, UP Baguio.

Earlier, you and your group paid a courtesy call to the Chancellor Dr Priscilla Supnet Macansantos.

Earlier, you and your Nakem group planned for the next big clandestine thing to wage a cultural and an epistemological and literacy war at the 7th Nakem in Leyte, with partners in that part of the country.

You thought that the meeting went well, and the talk too.

You thought that you had fun answering even the most difficult questions about Ilokano hegemony.

And you thought that you did not go there to pander to the convenient thoughts of the young people but to challenge them to think otherwise, including the need to get out of the herd, to get out of the mass.

The 2012 Nakem Conference Abstract Selection Committee will begin to accept paper proposals that zero in on the conference theme, 'Pag-angkon: Our Right to Our Languages, Our Right to Education that Emancipates'.

Details of the call will be uploaded to the Nakem site, nakemconferences.blogspot.com, to the Nakem FB site, and to other dedicated sites such as the sites of the sponsoring institutions.

All these issues of displacement in historical consciousness are not easy to spot in an increasingly homogenized society like the Philippines, like the United States, and like any other country pretending that nationalism is equal to the singularity of a language spoken by all its citizens under the guise of national language.

The fetish for national language must be called as such: a fetish that has given rise to our growing inabilities to go multicultural and diverse, to relate to each other using a variety of perspectives, and to be aware that we are not the only people in the country or in the world.

What we have continued to deny, to repress, and to hide is the fact that that the Philippines is a nation among nations.

All told, many of our writers insisted on writing in the Ilokano language even if they also dabbled in other languages.

This act of resistance, however inchoate, issued out a memorandum to those proponents of a national literature that believes only in the literature written in the national or international language.

From the ranks of teachers, there were those doing “clandestine guerilla” cultural work in their classrooms, such as the one done by Joel Manuel using Ilokano to teach high school physics somewhere out there in Banna, Ilocos Norte

In the same vein, another superintendent of schools, Norma Fernando, saw to it that for the first time, a student paper in Ilocos Norte was produced in Ilokano, with only sections in English and Filipino, a reversal of the more official and DepEd sanctioned campus journalism practice of a school paper in the dominant languages of instructions.

These acts, while admittedly individual, reflect the political climate that we must recognize as present in our educational practice.

It is not true that the Ilokano teacher in his Ilokano classroom cannot create an Ilokano environment of instruction and education following the route of the clandestine teacher.

How much he can sustain this without the support of his superiors in the pecking order of educational hierarchy and power remains a question.

Never mind that in coming up with these innovations, his students learn more and better.

Never mind that his students come to a fuller understanding of his world.

What cannot be delayed, however, is the immediacy and urgency of making knowledge possible for his students.

These realizations made us sit up at Nakem Conferences. No, we cannot sit back, relax, and enjoy the educational specter of a continuing cultural tyranny and linguistic injustice among our young people.

We know at Nakem Conferences that we are here trying to come to voice, to understand once more what we have lost, what have been left of us, and what we can to do retrace ourselves back to the what, in bell hooks’ words, “education as the practice of freedom.”

Our coming to voice—the realization that we have not had our own speech in a long, long while—is an act of courage that we did not know we had in the beginning.

Ilokanos have been taught to make subordinate their claims to their own sense of nationhood.

While that sense was clear prior to the onset of the Spanish colonization in 1572, that has been totally wiped out in lieu of a political project called the Philippine nation-state, a latter-day product of a political imaginary borne of centuries of repression, oppression, and colonization.

In 2008, Nakem Conference problematized this reality in its conference, and called its conference, “Imagining the Ilokano and Amianan Nation.”

The Honorable Carlos Padilla, in his keynote address at the conference, said that the Ilokano and Ilokanized people need not imagine the Ilokano—and by extension, the Amianan—nation because that nation exists, that it is real, and that it has remained intact. We did not realize that our small acts of resistance at Nakem Conference, if you can call it this way, were acts that take their energy from other people doing the same thing for their own people and for others, such as Myles Horton for Highlander School, and Paulo Freire for his theory and practice of liberatory education, his ‘pedagogy of the oppressed.’

We realized later on that this rendering of the sense of nation of the smaller ‘nations’ within a nation-state into something obsolete and unnecessary is a tactic of all nation-states to centralize and consolidate their full control of the personal and collective lives of their peoples, so that in their full control and consolidation, they can project that the life of their own nation-state has primordial value over the life of that nation-state’s constituent indigenous communities.

Philippine historical narrative is replete with this official positioning, with Manuel Luiz Quezon preferring a Philippine nation run like hell by Filipinos to a Philippine nation run like heaven by other people but that nation that is in his mind was patterned after the 19th century nation-state of Europe particularly England, Germany, France, and Spain—nation-states all that consolidated power by invoking oneness minus plurality of cultural lives and that took up the task of implementing an officially sanctioned ‘national’ language.

What we have for long in the Philippines, even as we sanctified the nation-state project and even as we give entitlements and privileges to other languages, is the continuing denial that this country, that this homeland, is not only the homeland of a few but a homeland of the many that is us, the many and varied ethnic groups—each individually unique—that are called Filipinos, yes the many that are called by other names such as Ilokanos, Cebuanos, Hiligaynons, Bicols, Kapampangan, Pangasinense, Chavacanos, Ivatans, Kalanguyas, and so forth.

There is a move to completely abolish the Office of Language Access under the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, according to Serafin Colmenares, Jr.

Colmenares is the current executive director of OLA, an office established during the term of office of then Governor Linda Lingle to “ensure that no person is denied access to state and state-funded services due to their limited ability to speak, read, write or understand English.”

The recommendation for OLA’s defunding, and then its complete abolition, came from the director of that department, Dwight Takamine.

In the State of Hawaii, there are about 140,000 individuals who are not proficient in the English language.

This number, a big chunk of the state population, represents the urgency of the need for interpreters and translators in order for these individuals to gain access to basic government services.

At the heart of OLA is equal access.

Equal access here is the ensuring that every individual in the State of Hawaii is not denied of her right to access state programs whether that individual understands English or not.

This premise springs from the notion that language access—the access to all government programs through the language one is most at home with, which, in a country of migrants like the United States means the use of the first language of the immigrant—is a matter of civil, and thus human right.

The federal government, through its many enactments, recognizes the fundamental character of this right.

And now, here is the twist.

A federal pronouncement defines this right in theory and practice, and a state defines it another way.

Following this argument, the move to defund, and thus eventually to completely abolish this crucial service of providing “centralized oversight, coordination, and technical assistance to State agencies (the executive, legislative and judicial branches of Hawai‘i’s state government) and organizations that receive state funding” is a contradiction.

The move to have it abolished will deprive the individuals with limited English proficiency to have access to government resources that are aimed to mainstream them into a life of full citizenship.

The move to have it abolished will deprive us of oversight of those government and non-government organizations that receive funding from the state, and from the federal government.

The move to have it abolished will deprive us of coordination work in the providing of efficient access to government programs most needed by individuals with limited English proficiency.

The move to have it abolished will deprive us of technical assistance that we most need in making it certain that those LEP individuals who come into this land do not end up as liabilities but useful, even productive assets for our new homeland.

For this is what we are as American people: welcoming, and with a welcoming heart.

For this is what we are as the old, and the new, American people: fair and just.

For this is what we are as natural-born, or naturalized, American citizens: freedom loving, and capable of celebrating our differences.

In our welcoming ways as well as in the fairness and justness of what we do is the very principle of our American nation, the principle of unity in diversity, in the ‘e pluribus unum’—in the ‘out of many, one’—vision that has defined our homeland.

One of the hallmarks of diversity is the respect for the new immigrant, the potentially new American that brings in so many gifts and talents, so much vision and hope, and so much love for our democratic way of life.

There is no better way of demonstrating that American welcome and its vast possibilities for a new American people except to be true to the very tenets of our democratic life.